Abstract

Autonomy or isolation?

Leaving both ghettos behind

Shrugging off the gatekeeper's leash

Escaping the Duchampian hothouse

Beyond representation

Unsustainable economies

Unsustainable ecologies: simulation

Unsustainable ecologies: execution

A talk by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito of Still Water as part of ARCO Madrid 2009.

The contents are inspired by conclusions of the book At the Edge of Art.

"The new world is there, just round the corner or, to return to the cutesy flower metaphor--under the snow. It is in the art that exists outside the confines of the art world, rejecting the contextual definition of Duchampian origin which seems to persist...purely by inertia; it is in the art that seeks out public space, media space, biotechnology labs and the world of information, communications and e-commerce as its operative environment."

--Domenico Quaranta, curator's statement for Expanded Box, ARCO Madrid 2009.

The question of "automony or isolation" posed by Domenico Quaranta in his introduction to the 2009 ARCO Experts' Forum suggests that new media art has yet to find its place, that it is somehow withering on the vine (to borrow Quaranta's flower metaphor) on the margins of relevance, at the risk of never crossing the verge into the well-tended garden of Art.

Well, it would be a shame if new media never took root in the white cube, but it would be more of a loss for the white cube than for new media art. For the flowers of new media art that Domenico describes may be wild, but they are hardier than the dainty ornaments that the art world showers with attention and cash. This feral creativity has learned to survive in a world much bigger than the art world's cloistered hothouse. The most adaptable of these strains have taken root everywhere from junkyards to e-commerce sites. And nearly all of these strains have learned to cast their seeds on that most modern and global of prevailing currents, the Internet.

Of course, the art world looks pretty big when you're standing on the monumental steps of the Prado or the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Surely art exhibitions and fairs command more attention than the lonely artist-created projects scattered across the Web?

The answer is no--not by a long shot. By 2006 the photo-sharing site Flickr had 250,000 users and 4 million photos; at this writing, it has 8 billion. Flickr also has discovery tools, including folksonomy tags, algorithms to find what's interesting, and search engines like Retrievr that let you sketch the photograph you're looking for.

"That's not a fair comparison," you say. "You have to compare two venues devoted exclusively to art." OK, here are some numbers from February 2003:

Metropolitan Museum of Art (best-known brick-and-mortar museum)
2 million artworks
5 million visitors per year
5,000,000/2,000,000 = 2.5 visits per artwork

Rhizome.org (best-known virtual museum)
600 artworks
4 million visitors per year
4,000,000/600 = 7,000 visits per artwork

Which is the ghetto?

The audience numbers are skewed for art historians as well. Publish in an academic journal and a handful of people familiar with your subdiscipline might read it. In a new media context, by contrast, influence is counted in four to seven digits rather than two to three. 50 million Americans visited blogs during the first quarter of 2005. This is something the hard scientists figured out a while ago. Grigory Perelman, the scholar who recently proved the Poincare Conjecture--known as the "Holy Grail of mathematics"--didn't even bother to publish his proof in a peer-reviewed journal. He just uploaded it to a Web site.

A year or two ago Jon was invited by a prestigious new media center to review books on new media art and theory for a feature on their Web site. At first he thought "I don't have time to do this," but then remembered that he had taken it upon himself to write Amazon reviews of a few recent MIT Press titles as a sort of public service for the field. Jon asked LBI if they would consider republishing these, and they graciously accepted, citing the importance of spreading the word as far as possible.

The next suggestion, however, went too far. Would they consider re-posting the reviews they solicited from other authors back onto Amazon, so as to put them also under the nose of the public at large? The answer was no--their pressing goal was to gain more acceptance for new media among the curators and critics who ply the mainstream art world.

The staff of this center is smart, have their heart in the right place, and didn't say anything different than most new media art institutions would have under the circumstances. But why are we so eager to knock through the walls of the Media Art ghetto just to find ourselves within a slightly larger Mainstream Art ghetto?

Fine, you say, but the typical artist doesn't want to be left adrift among the LOLcats and dancing baby videos. Artists are brought up to think approval matters more if it comes from a curator or dealer than from a neighbor or studiomate. And in return those curators and dealers will take care of them. Without the attention of gatekeepers, new media art will never find a place in the white cube.

That's probably true. But new media artists currently invest enormous amounts of personal energy and ambition in contorting their work into a shape that will fit through the gallery door. The best you can hope for such effort is usually to end up in some darkened "media gallery" of a museum--the artistic equivalent of the short bus.

The average new media artist would be much better off using the Internet to cultivate an audience ten or a hundred or a thousand times larger. Sure, there are obstacles to this leap; the typical gallerygoer may have a more critical perception of technology than, say, the average Slashdot user. But the leap is not as big as it seems. Some of the most popular creative phenomena of 21st-century networked culture had precedents in artistic work of the 1990s. Google Earth is a networked version of Art + Com's Terravision; Electric Sheep is a screensaver version of Karl Sims' genetic images; Wikileaks is an update on Antoni Muntades' File Room.

This leap gets easier every year, as the general public increasingly speaks the language of new media better than the language of art. Include a game console in an exhibition, and you'll get quizzical looks from the curators and docents. But the guards and ordinary visitors will be all over it. For a new media artist to concentrate exclusively on the art world is like a Chinese businessman in Hong Kong concentrating exclusively on English patrons. Both are ignoring the billion potential customers who speak their language. Sure, you're not likely to appeal to all of them--but at that scale, you only need a tiny fraction of their eyeballs to do better than what you'd get from the art world.

In his curatorial statement for the 2009 ARCO Expanded Box exhibition, Domenico Quaranta throws down a gauntlet to the mainstream art world, claiming that "the contextual definition of Duchampian origin"--art is whatever you see in a gallery--"seems to persist purely by inertia." By contrast, he claims that the function of Expanded Box is "cultivating and redistributing the future, and supporting an 'expanded' definition of art."

Quaranta's sentiment echoes At the Edge of Art's condemnation of the art world's misinterpretation of Duchamp, but we go further in indicting the art world for its philosophical laziness. We believe there's an appalling lack of correlation between what elite society currently thinks of as art and what really deserves that designation. By the time you've seen your tenth Big Red Sculpture outside a new public building, does it still move you as art?

Ours was no argument to return to an academic definition; a look around ARCO reveals plenty of academicism already masquerading as art. Instead we sought to unmask artlike activity that really functions more as decor, propaganda, or investment--and to draw attention to truly radical artistic activity germinating far from the art world's tulipomania.

But what power remains for art that is uprooted from its Duchampian hothouse and left to fend for itself in the wild world outside?

Guernica is a powerful work of art; it has the power to inform, to stir up feelings, perhaps in very rare cases even to incite to action. But it is old media, and its power is eclipsed by those who control old media, whether they be the Reina Sofia or Time-Warner.

New media creators wield new powers that go beyond representing the outside world in a white cube or rectangular frame. One of new media's newfound powers is simulation. Artists can build three-dimensional worlds from MUDs or virtual reality engines; communities can explore direct democracy in online spaces with few repercussions for the real world. Simulation is still an important technique for much new media production.

But new media creators also wield an even more powerful tool than simulation: execution. The ability to execute code gives artists reach and influence over social systems of global proportions. Computer code underpins the Internet; genetic code organizes living beings; legal codes rule the court system. Unlike Guernica, executable art forms don't incite action--they act.

So to what purpose should new media artists apply their newfound powers of simulation and execution?

Well, here in 2009, on the brink of economic and ecological collapse, our society can use all the help we can get--even from artists. Fortunately, the evidence we put forward in At the Edge of Art argues that artists may in the best position of anyone to help us confront the many changes we face in the 21st century. Simulation allows artists to envision new possibilities before they arrive over the horizon, while execution enables them to expose and sometimes defuse threats that might have otherwise seemed too formidable to surmount.

So let's look at some artists who use simulation and execution to confront the unsustainable practices that threaten to doom us all.

After the subprime meltdown of fall 2008, we all know that the "free" license given to multinational corporations in the previous decades was anything but. Maybe we should have been paying attention to new media artists like the Yes Men, famous pranksters who simulated Web sites such as dowethics.com and gatt.org to get the attention of the business community and mass media, and then dropped PR bombshells when invited to comment on current news stories. 

You can't tackle a global behemoth by exhibiting at MoMA; by leveraging Internet publicity to hijack mass media, the Yes Men prompted President George W. Bush to declare there are limits to freedom and announced the dissolution of the World Trade Organization to the surprise of the Canadian parliament and other governments around the world. Their press release declaring that Dow Chemical apologized for the Bhopal gas disaster tanked the company's stock share 4% in 23 minutes, thus revealing the fragile standing of companies based on unethical business practices.

Closer to home in the art world, the artist duo of Eva and Franco Mattes, AKA 0100101110101101.org, orchestrated the simulation of Darko Maver--an artist who actually triumphed in the White Cube. Produced by a clever marketing campaign, this fictional artist gained notoriety for his "simulated" photographs of atrocities from the Balkan war of the late 1990s. When Maver made it all the way to the pinnacle of the mainstream art world--the Venice Biennale--the artists issued a press release declaring that reality and simulation had been swapped: Maver was fake, but the "simulated" corpses in his artworks were real atrocities from the war photographed by journalists. More revolting than the realization that Maver's grisly imagery came from the real world was the art world's eagerness to indulge in a titillating display of gore rather than look beneath the surface.

Quaranta's Expanded Box exhibition contains a suite of network interventions by Hans Bernard, Livlix, Alessandro Ludovico, and Paulo Cirio, called EKMRZ, that uses executable code to take on the giants of e-commerce. Amazon Noire employs an algorithm to make free versions of books out of Amazon's "look inside the book" feature. Google Will Eat Itself marshalls a squadron of software bots that simulate Web visitors clicking on Google ads. While the artists are not the first to trick Google's advertisers into forking over money for non-existent products, their hack is not mere profit-taking; the artists aim to buy Google stock with their proceeds, thus making Google "eat itself."

One reason climate change is such a daunting problem is its scale. It's hard to gauge the impact of the carbon footprint of seven billion people, or the ramifications of today's policies on the earth centuries or millennia from now. For artists who want to help society foresee the consequences of its current actions, simulation is a powerful technique.

Mindful of the rising seawaters that may threaten coastal cities from Manhattan to Tokyo in the century to come, artist Jane Marsching and architect Mitchell Joachim of Terreform have created a visualization of seven flood-bound cities uprooting themselves from their prior moorings and migrating to the soon-to-be-temperate zone of the arctic. Future North may not simulate the most practical approach to global warming, but it does stimulate imaginative rumination into our possible future.

John Gerrard, also an artist in the Expanded Box exhibition, offers a much less optimistic simulation--one based not on a speculative future but on a dystopian present. His virtual reality world Grow Finish Unit aims to be an accurate model of a mechanized "pig production facility" in Kansas, complete with vast lakes of pig poo and a fleet of trucks that arrive periodically to swap out the unlucky inhabitants of this nightmarish agribusiness.

The serious game World Without Oil aims to move its participants from dystopia to utopia--and from simulation to execution--by encouraging them to imagine their daily lives without fossil fuels and act appropriately. The consequences of "executing" these game rules in ordinary life can be lasting; at least one participant has decided to continue biking to work after his experience with the game.

Artist Lynn Hull also hopes her audience's experience with her work will change it--even if her audience is not human. Hull crafts resting spots for birds whose migratory paths have been lost or altered due to global development in rural areas. Her work would lose its relevance--not to mention its intended audience--were it relegated to a white cube.

Martin Prothero also does his best work in the woods, though his chosen format of photography makes his own migration back and forth from the white cube a bit easier. That said, his subjects are not passive objects of the photographer's lens, but active participants--especially in his recordings of animal tracks on glass plates coated with carbon:

"As an artist, I can think of no better way of representing a wild creature, than letting it represent itself. After a long and thorough process of researching the animal's habits: where they sleep, feed, drink and cross the land, I begin the recording process. This is where I collaborate with the individual creatures to allow them to make the drawings you see here. The point in time when a drawing is made records the point where my life and the animal's life crossed."

Prothero's images remind global policymakers that we can learn from tracking carbon footprints at all scales.

Simulation meets execution once again in Natalie Jeremijenko's Feral Robotic Dogs. Jeremijenko works with high school and college students to rewire mechanical toys into pollution-sniffing canines and deploy them in landfills and other neighborhoods that may harbor environmental toxins. Given new barking orders by a software hack, Jeremijenko's mechanical pups can do more than serve as entertaining pets for affluent owners. No longer confined to quarters, they roam across the wild, living out more productive lives that contribute to a healthier planet.

Wouldn't it be great if all new media art could do the same?